About That $1,000 Prize

I wanted to promote Perl 6 development, and I especially wanted to promote the development of Perl 6 related documentation. In my early attempts to play around with Perl 6 in my very limited spare time, I found the lack of a well-organized and up-to-date point of departure to be moderately frustrating. I thought this was likely to be a fairly common and counterproductive experience, and I've seen a significant number of comments that seem to bear this out. I've also seen lots of useful pointers and suggestions pass through mail lists and elsewhere (which many of us don't have the time to keep up with). Unfortunately, most of this information wasn't being collected and saved in a way that others could readily find and use.

These issues seemed like the obvious place to focus my limited resources so as to get the maximum leverage for helping Perl 6 take off, and for helping greatly enlarge to community of prospective users. So I first proposed a $1,000 prize for creating a Perl 6 based Perl 6 Wiki. (http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/127) For various reasons (see perl.perl6.users archives for details), a satisfactory arrangement was never reached.

In retrospect, the latest proposal is what I should have started with.

About Me

I did the original Perl 6 Users FAQ. The increasingly unwieldy newsgroup FAQ ultimately morphed into the original content for this wiki, with a lot of help from the people at perl.net.au, who originally put it on their wiki. I later used that to provide the first big batch of content for this Wiki.

My previously thwarted attempts to create a user-oriented Perl 6 Google Group, and later, difficulties in trying to resurrect perl.perl6.meta for this purpose, eventually stimulated the creation of perl.perl6.users. (Thanks to Ask Bjørn Hansen and others on #perl6.)

Recent ancient history (i.e. around the turn of the century): I jumped through the procedural hoops needed to establish the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.ruby in the "big 8" hierarchy, because I thought Ruby was great (and still do), and because I hoped it might spur serious OO improvements to Perl 5. This was some time before there was a Perl 6 project, when most people considered the idea of a major change to Perl 5 to be insane. I've been a long time {Perl 3, Perl 4, and Perl 5} user and fan, but I've always disliked Perl 5's OO, morphing sigils, and kludgy parameter passing.

Perl 6 forecast on 12-18-2005: "Perl 6 — The Next “World’s Greatest Programming Super-Language” (http://www.athenalab.com/#_Perl6). At the time, most people seemed to think that Perl 6 would never be completed, or that if it ever did get done, it would be too late to catch on. However the memories of somewhat analogous skepticism about Ruby were still fresh in my mind.